


and i'm destroying every bet i've made

by chidorinnn



Series: peregrinate [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Dragon Age II - Act 1, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Protective Varric Tethras, Varric Tethras waxes poetic about Hawke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-24 18:23:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16645454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chidorinnn/pseuds/chidorinnn
Summary: Varric likes watching Hawke cast magic. It’s not something he’ll ever tell her to her face; if he waxes poetic about it in his books, he writes it in a way that can easily be interpreted as a case of perfectly innocent hero worship.—butMaker, does Varric like watching her cast magic.





	and i'm destroying every bet i've made

Two weeks into their acquaintanceship, Varric comes to the realization that Hawke can control the weather.

It’s not something that immediately occurs to him. Varric wouldn’t call himself an expert on mages, by any means, and all he has to fall back on is whatever scant bits and pieces he’s picked up from the Templars, tranquil, and occasional apostate. But Hawke is not like most other mages.

She really likes the rain, for one — something, Varric assumes, born from her upbringing in whatever backwater Ferelden village she came from. Most of the days she asks him to accompany her on an errand are rainy ones or at the very least, overcast.

And then there’s her magic: lightning, perhaps the most obvious one, that she lets rain down on whatever poor sods have the misfortune of crossing their path — lightning that blends  _awfully_  well with the rain, that  _always_  seems to coincide with her deadlines, self-imposed or otherwise.

“I can’t control the weather,” she says when Varric points it out. “All I can do is move the clouds.”

“Right,” Carver drawls. “Like that’s any different.”

“It is!” she insists. “I can’t control whether it’s going to rain or not, but I  _can_  pull the clouds closer if I want it to rain today.”

“And if you don’t?” asks Varric.

“Then I push them away, so that it will rain later.” She smiles, a proud gleam to her eyes that Varric has come to learn is a sure sign of any mage confident in their power. “The presence of clouds implies that it will rain regardless. All I can control is where and when it happens.”

“So…” Varric says, “you can control the weather.”

“Don’t fight it, Sister,” says Carver, flatly, and Hawke sighs.

“You make it sound so  _nefarious_ ,” she says, directing the smile she can't quite suppress towards the ground.

“I still think it’s unnecessary,” he retorts. “If you need to rearrange the entire sky just to use your power, then maybe you shouldn’t…” He trails off then as he looks away from her and straight ahead. Without warning, he grabs her elbow — and because this is clearly a routine they’ve practiced before, Hawke lets her bad leg fold into a stumble. Carver pulls her just a little bit closer, as she takes longer than usual to right herself — deliberately. Her brows pinch together in a not inaccurate impression of pain, oddly frail and delicate and far weaker than Varric has ever seen her.

Varric looks to the other side of the street, at the three fully armed and armored Templars  congregated there, and understands why she leans so heavily into her staff then — as if it’s a real walking stick after all.

It occurs to him, too, that lightning magic would look  _awfully_  strange in broad daylight, without a single cloud in sight.

* * *

Varric likes watching Hawke cast magic. It’s not something he’ll ever tell her to her face; if he waxes poetic about it in his books, he writes it in a way that can easily be interpreted as a case of perfectly innocent hero worship.

—but  _Maker_ , does Varric like watching her cast magic.

It takes him some time to pick up on it, and it’s a testament to just how good Hawke is at hiding it. They’ll be in the mountains, and the ground will tremble beneath his feet in a display of magic she surely wouldn’t attempt anywhere near Kirkwall — except, when he turns to look, it’s as if she hasn’t moved at all.

Not like Anders, whose magic relies on his staff as a focus, starting in his body and pulsing through the staff before it’s projected outwards — evidence of his Circle upbringing, because it’s damn near the same setup every time he casts a spell, the same as damn near every other mage Varric has had the distinct pleasure of meeting. Not like Merrill, an exception to the above rule who throws her whole body into her spells because magic, she once said, is everywhere — in the trees, in the air, in the ground beneath their feet, in everything that lives in this world.

“Hiding this kind of magic,” Hawke says one day when the three of them are holed up in Anders’ clinic, waving her hand as if to indicate Anders’ — and hers as well, apparently — particular brand of healing and restorative magic, “is all about  _timing_.”

Anders sits up from the cot he’s occupied, and says, “Oh really?”

Hawke smiles and points at the bottles stacked in the corner of the room. “Try an Elfroot potion,” she says.

Anders raises a questioning eyebrow at her, and goes and does just that. He swallows one potion, and then frowns at the empty bottle in his hands. “Wait,” he says. “I didn’t… did you tamper with this?”

Varric did, in fact, see her mixing potions earlier — a side affect of her not having Anders’ seemingly endless reserves of mana and energy. Hawke smiles wryly and says, “No. Try again.”

Anders drinks another potion, and—there. The tiniest twitch of her fingers, just as the bottle touches his lips. His eyes light up in understanding, and Hawke reaches into her pouch for another bottle — this one bearing a reddish, thinner liquid. “Try this.” Anders gives her a questioning look, but complies nonetheless.

He frowns a bit as he swallows the potion, and this time, Varric pays attention to her hands — the imperceptible flick of her wrist, this time just as Anders finishes the potion. “What did I just drink?”

“Sugar and water,” she replies. “And a little bit of juice.”

Anders nods approvingly and says, grinning, “Very clever.”

“ _Genius_ ,” escapes from Varric before he can stop it. Anders raises an eyebrow at him knowingly; Hawke doesn’t react at all.

* * *

—and it always comes back to  _secrecy_ , with Hawke.

“What are you going to do if the Templars come here?” she asks Anders one day when they stumble into his clinic, covered in blood.

Anders gives her a  _look_ , because he didn’t escape from the Circle seven times for nothing. “It’s  _fine_ , Hawke,” he says maybe a bit too forcefully. “I can handle it.”

Hawke gives him a  _look_  as well, because she didn’t spend her entire life outside the Circle for nothing. “Anders,” she says, and Varric has only known her for a few weeks, but he’s come to learn that this is Hawke speak for  _I care about you, so please don’t fight me on this._

Anders sighs and asks, petulantly, “Why doesn’t Merrill get this lecture?”

“Because you’d be surprised at how much you can pass off as  _Dalish customs_ ,” Varric answers. Not to mention, Kirkwall’s alienage is the kind that invokes  _invisibility_.

This conversation is a bomb waiting to explode, because it doesn’t take a genius to realize that Hawke’s little tricks and sleights of hand are nowhere near enough to mask the enormity of Anders’ personal brand of healing magic. She hasn’t spent a single day in a Circle, a feat no doubt due to years of preparation and practice — and yet, Anders had spent nearly his entire childhood and a significant portion of his adult life in a Circle, and thus has a better idea of what to expect from Templars and the Chantry.

Still, she refuses to back down — and it's not like either of them have known Anders for very long, but Varric has spent enough time in Kirkwall to know that mages, regardless of how well they know each other, will stick up for one another.

“I’ll… be more careful,” Anders concedes, and Varric would like to think that he means it. “But I’ll be  _fine_. I have papers.”

“Grey Warden papers?” Varric asks.

“I thought you’re no longer with them,” says Hawke, tilting her head to the side.

“I’m not,” Anders answers her, “but the Warden Commander thought it would be a good idea for me to hold onto them anyway. Just as a precaution.”

“Smart woman,” Varric muses. Anders smiles at him, and nods.

“And you’re sure this will be enough?” Hawke asks.

“Trust me,” says Anders, smiling tiredly. “I’m in less danger than you are, at this point.”

It’s… strange, to think of Hawke in danger.  _Danger_  in this case doesn’t mean someone who necessarily wants her dead, or some beast or monster out for her blood — but maybe that makes it worse, because this is a danger only to her and the people in Kirkwall that are like her. This is not a danger to Varric, who will never be a mage and whose hypothetical future children, for the most part, will not be mages.

—but he can’t deny that there’s some sense to what Anders had said: Anders has the Grey Wardens to fall back on, in the worst case scenario. Merrill belongs to a culture that Kirkwall as a whole can’t be bothered to understand, and it gives her an advantage that few others can weaponize.

Hawke has only herself, and her mother who was once nobility but is no longer, and her brother who is nearing his wit’s end with the fact that her very existence necessitates that he, too, makes himself out to be lesser than he is.

(Hawke, sitting by herself at a table in the back corner of the Hanged Man, in a rumpled tunic and her pants bunching awkwardly in her boots, stone-cold sober as her eyes shone with unshed tears. It had taken Varric a while to notice her at all, which had probably been her intention all along, but once he did, he took her straight to his room. If she was going to break down, she could at least do so in relative privacy.

She sank into a chair at his table and buried her face in her hands. “Brothers are so  _stupid_ ,” she said in a tremendously wobbly voice. She didn't have to tell them about the Templars that would linger too close to Gamlen's hut and the Hanged Man, or the Chantry sisters that would watch her every time she set foot in that damned building; Varric's money already lined the pockets of plenty of Fereldan mercenaries who would ensure that she made it home every day.

He pressed his hand into her back and said, bitterly, “Bartrand and Junior should start a club.”

Some days later, he overheard her asking Anders if it was  _really_  that bad in the Circle, and Varric took it as his cue to drum up every contact he had for more jobs. It would make the following days hectic, put her in even more danger of being caught — but she’s  _so_  close to her fifty-sovereign goal, and it would be worth it if it bought him even one more day where she wouldn’t walk into the Circle herself.)


End file.
